Gates Foundation calls for funding to save children from malnutrition, diseases

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has warned that an additional 40 million children will suffer from hunger’s worst effects by 2050 due to climate change.

The foundation called on world leaders to increase global health spending where it is needed most to boost children’s health and nutrition, especially in the face of the global climate crisis.

In its eighth annual Goalkeepers report titled, “A Race to Nourish a Warming World,” the foundation projected that without immediate global action, climate change will condemn an additional 40 million children to stunting and 28 million more to wasting between 2024 and 2050.

The report noted that Scaling up solutions now can avoid this outcome while also building resilience to climate change and spurring much-needed economic growth. 

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It stated that the 2023, the World Health Organization estimated that 148 million children experienced stunting, a condition where children do not grow to their full potential mentally or physically while 45 million children experienced wasting, a condition where children become weak and emaciated, leaving them at much greater risk of developmental delays and death.

The author of the report and the Co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates said that the world is contending with more challenges than at any point particularly inflation, debt, and new wars. 

He regretted that aid is not keeping pace with these needs, particularly in the places that need it the most.

“I think we can give global health a second act—even in a world where competing challenges require governments to stretch their budgets,” Gates said.

He lamented that malnutrition is “the world’s worst child health crisis adding that climate change is only making it worse. 

Amidst this crisis, Gates stressed the need to maintain global health funding; immediately addressing the growing threat of child malnutrition by supporting the Child Nutrition Fund, a new platform that coordinates donor financing for nutrition; and governments fully funding the established institutions that have proven effective at protecting millions of lives each year. 

Gates observed that these institutions include Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which is due to hold its next funding replenishment in 2025; and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

“If we do these three things, we won’t just usher in a new global health boom and save millions of lives—we’ll also prove that humanity can still rise to meet our greatest challenges,” Gates said.

According to the World Bank, the cost of undernutrition is US$3 trillion in productivity loss yearly because malnutrition stunts people’s physical and cognitive abilities.

In low-income countries, that loss ranges from 3% to 16% (or more) of GDP, which amounts to a permanent 2008-level global recession annually.

Gates pointed out that the best way to fight the impacts of climate change is by investing in nutrition.

“If we solve malnutrition, we make it easier to solve every other problem. We solve extreme poverty. Vaccines are more effective. And deadly diseases like malaria and pneumonia become far less fatal,” Gates said.

The report highlighted proven tools that are helping solve malnutrition, building people’s resilience to the worst impacts of climate change, and further driving down childhood deaths.

According to Gates, New agricultural technologies are producing up to two to three times more milk and safer milk, which can prevent millions of cases of child stunting by 2050.